The trouble with pondering is you just never know where you'll end up.....

“When American companys(ies) were allowed to produce their goods outside of the USA for cheap labor and lower taxes is when your freedoms started to disappear…”

I purposefully did not identify the young man who made that remark because I’m sure he didn’t  think it through, which is something that all of do from time to time…

Anyway, I tend to think that we Americans began to lose our freedoms when so many of us developed the idea that our government was actually in charge of us, that by electing them to represent us, they somehow had become our bosses and gained the right to allow or deny whatever it was that we wanted to do…

“T’aint so, McGee!”  Molly...

Our country, such as it is, exists because a small group of Anarchists, realizing that they couldn’t fight the British government on their own,  joined forces under a contract that realized that some anarchic freedoms could not be allowed, ie; shouting fire in a crowded theater, just for an example…

Somewhere during the signing of that contract, hereinafter referred to as The Declaration of Independence, one of them made the remark that if they did not hang together, they would most assuredly hang separately!

Over the years, that basic contract has continued to stand…

What caused companies to seek other, more favorable climes (lower production costs eqals higher profits) was the ever-increasing regulations levied by our own government.  

As a country, we have seen the results of unfettered capitalism which, at the turn of the 20th Century, brought on necessary regulations but now we’re seeing the result of going too far in the opposite direction…(pendulum swings) 

Too many restrictive regulations not only cause companies to flee but often force smaller companies into bankruptcy or worse yet, stifle the entrepreneurship that made the USA the powerhouse that it was.

So, the young mans basic error was in assuming that our government is supposed to be in charge of us when, in fact, it’s the other way round...

Y’see, our Constitution states pretty specifically that our government is not allowed to impinge on our liberties, that the government works for us, not us for them…

In the old world (historically speaking for the educationally challenged) ie; europe, et al, countries were ruled by Monarchs, Dictators, Chancellors, ’n a plethora of Kings, great and small…a few countries had developed into parliamentary rule (think England) but the State owned everything and the people were subject to the State (think property rights)….

In this, considered The New World back then, our Constitution stated emphatically, We, the people…we own the property and the government is prohibited by Law from trespassing or otherwise interfering with us…

That’s a pretty simple statement yet it enforces the fact that our representative government works for us and not the other way round…

In the last few decades, our population has increased by leaps and bounds, many people coming from countries where the idea of private ownership of real property is prohibited except by the government and the people are subject to that government and their lifetime expectations of looking to the government was brought here with them.  

Sadly, the elitists among us, those masquerading as liberal progressives, have seized upon this component and used it, fairly successfully, it seems, to remake America into a country more in line with their own ideology (think socialist states like Sweden)…

In my opinion, what these people lack is the understanding that countries like Sweden (’n to a large part, most of europe) only exists because of being subsidized by capitalist countries like the USA…

Socialist government are, by their very nature, nothing more than Ponzi schemes, an inverted pyramid that must  collapse of its own weight at some point in time (witness all past efforts of such governments throughout history)…

In California, though it is not readily apparrent, our very own inverted pyramid is growing heavier almost on a daily basis~Our governor and legislature tell us how well we are doing, how unemployment is dropping, that prosperity is just around the corner, two or more cars in every garage (no gas) and a tofu chicken in every pot (if you have a pot left)…the Supreme Court says plans for a high speed rail (that only the wealthy can afford to use) can proceed…soon we’ll begin construction of tunnels under the fragile ecosystem of our Delta will transport water to our arid south (home of most of our unemployed) ’n the evil corporate farmers will have to make haste to start over in China or somewhere…

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things; freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them." Mark Twain

I wanted to call this 'All hat 'n no cattle' but, as is often the case when my fingers do the walking, this posting took a different turn....

T’day ain’t really been a good day…’n truth to tell, it ain’t been what I’d call a really good week so whatever I manage to put down here in this little espistle prob’ly won’t ever see the light of day…that’s alright…might not see the dark of nite either…. Anyhow, like most other people who manage to make it into their dotage, I make it a habit to read the obits, not only here in the Sac papers but back home as well ’n truth be told, I pay more attention to the hometown papers than I do here in norCal because that’s where I get the news about my oldest ’n dearest friends... Me ’n my peers are getting older, seems like sometimes, by the minnit…’n they just keep on dying…one or two, now ’n then, all adds up, y’know….same thing for She who must be obeyed…just one of the perils of aging… Thing is, we all gotta go ’n someday, it’ll be my turn…’course, when that day comes, it’s gonna necessarily be someone else reading my obit…well, that’s my guess anyhow….I really don’t know… My friend, Marvin, sez he just wants to wake up dead some morning…’n it just might be that when we die, why we just naturally come fully awake for the first time in our lives ’n maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to read our own obits….just gotta hope whoever writes ‘em will be kind… When my friends go, I confess, it saddens me a bit but since I’m expecting it anyway, the biggest surprise is in finding out who it wuz this time… There’s a line in one of my fav’rit songs that goes…”as the days dwindle down to a precious few…” makes me think ever’ time one of us dies, the rest of us get t’be ‘the precious few’ ’n that in itself ‘ud be embarrassing ‘cept I got so old I don’t really get embarrassed by much of anything anymore…. ANYHOW…because it’s kind’a suspected, it ain’t my friends passing that saddens me so, nuh-uh! It’s when one of their children goes ’n though, as the old preacher use’ta say, none of us knows what lies beyond, so the young that pass go into the same unknown that the rest of us are bound for…what really saddens me when the young are called is the overwhelming grief of the parent left behind…. There are no words of comfort, no healing act of mercy, nothing that we can say or do at such a time….while it’s a fact that parents lose children, it just seems wrong that a parent should outlive any of their children…it just seems so very, very wrong!

Six of one, half dozen of the other...

“In due time…” Back in the year 2000, after a lifetime of thinking of m’self as a southern fried Democrat, I made a decision ’n renamed m’self as a (gasp) Republican… I tho’t about it a long time ‘fore I done it… My views hadn’t undergone any serious change, I considered m’self t’be relatively liberal in both tho’t ’n action… I wuz in complete agreement with the Civil Rights Act ’n even tho’t the much vaunted ‘War on Poverty’ wuz a good idea… Well, Hell, ‘course I ‘d think it wuz a good idea, having grown up ’n gone to school in Appalachia, the son of a coal miners daughter…I’d wandered my share of the hi-ways ’n by-ways of eastern Kentucky, sat in on various ’n sundry camp meetings ’n listened to the barbershop chats in more’n one ‘wide spot in the road’ designation that seem, even in this 21st Century, to characterize so many of the little towns ’n hamlets of the Kentucky mountains…. ANYHOW in the year, 2000, I’d had my fill of the progressive nonsense spouted by the Democrat politicians here in California that seemed t’be spreading throuhout the country, including D.C. Enough is enough, I tho’t ’n I changed my registration so’s I could vote for John McCain in the California primary… There is an awful lot in McCain’s life to respect…he wuz a little rowdy but he stood up well during his stay in The Hanoi Hilton ’n his refusal to ‘jump the line’ to get out because of the status of his daddy impressed me… I wuz less impressed with his actual campaigning…I understood that he didn’t want to get down in the dirt ’n grovel, didn’t want t’be known as just another mud-slinger…I understood that but, by God, I’ve had more’n my number of fights ’n win, lose, or draw, if you’re gonna be in a fight, you’re gonna get dirty… As a first-time Republican, I lost my vote as George W. turned out t’be pretty darn tenacious as a campaigner…That wuz alright, I didn’t mind George Bush, voted for him twice (in different elections, of course, no Democrat double voting for a born-again Republican)... The second time around for McCain , I took up the banner again, but while no one in the world would doubt that he could take a punch, why in hell didn’t he throw one occasionally…just damned embarrassing…. And I liked Romney…I liked the thought that he wuz more of a businessman than a politician…yeah, I knew he wuz Governor of Massawhatever but he didn’t have the sheen of the professional politician…But then, he wouldn’t fight either…turning the other cheek may be alright in a church but it’s a poor tactic in a fight... Thing is, I grew up a Democrat…’n not just a Democrat but a southern Democrat ’n one of the lessons I learned is that if you gotta fight, hit first, hit hard, ’n keep hitting until someone pulls you off….or, as wuz far too often in my youth, someone pulled the big SOB off me before he really hurt me….

Wed~Nes~Day..

As we strolled thru the village this morning under the normal cloudless norCal sky…(I wuz gonna say we sauntered but da boyz never ever saunter, they scamper, they frisk, they run full-tilt to the end of their leash, they make a lot of moves but they never ever saunter)… Ah well, it’s fall out here but if you wuz visiting from South Shore, Ky, you’d never know it…seasonal change is subtle here in norCal….the most distinct season being summer…y’know it’s summer when it’s just too durn hot ’n when ’n if it ain’t hot, it just might be winter…if it’s raining, you c’n be pretty sure it might be winter…that’s when we usually have rain but the last couple winters have been kind’a hard to tell ‘cuz we ain’t had a heckuva lot of rain ’n without rain, it’s pretty much like summer….Spring ’n Fall, you can pretty much tell ‘cuz that’s when we have the time change which kind’a messes with our body rhythms ’n gives working people an excuse for oversleeping…”I’m sorry, that damn time change has me confused. It won’t happen again until the next one.” So, Millyrose had the book club t’day, told me to take da boyz ’n go away…I asked her if we c’d come back ‘cuz you just never know these daze… A good time wuz had by ever’body (I guess, I wuzn’t there…me ’n Paul ’n da boyz went to In ’n Out ’n thence to the park where we dined on cheeseburgers ’n salty fries ’n sucked up co-cola thru a straw from large paper cups… I use’ta eat like that a lot but it’ud been awhile now since I had a meal quite that satisfying….big change from turkey ’n lettuce….hmmmmm… Can’t talk about p’litical stuff t’nite…just too damn much of it…Obama wuz right when he said the world just seems t’be spinning out of control…mostly, I think you can’t believe a word he says but t’give the devil his due, he’s right on target with that statement...

Once upon a time, dear children, pennies were actually made out of copper.....hence the term 'copper cent'...but maybe you never heard of that....

A recent FB discussion veered into the ‘minimum wage’ idiocy…’n yeah, I fully realize that calling it an idiocy comes under the heading of ‘name-calling’…. It ain’t rocket science, people, or even higher mathematics…basically, it comes down to grade school arithmetic, which, sadly in this modern day ’n age seems to be sumthin’ of a foreign language to the children of t’day…’n by children, I’m talking about that age group, 35 to 45, whose maturity level seems to have stalled somewhere around middle school… Even that reknown sage, Bill O’Reilly, supports a minimum wage of 10 to 15 dollars….I suspect that his rise to affluence has affected his brain cells and he really has become the ‘simple’ man that he brags about…. Not too long ago, one of the tone-deaf friends opined that ‘it must’a been nice living back in the ‘50s with the muscle cars when the price of gas wuz so low that gas mileage didn’t matter’….And that brings us to the crux of the matter, friends, gas mileage mattered just as much back then as it does t’day, maybe even more c’uz we didn’t have anything like the minimum wage in those halycon days of yore….when your job (if y’cud find one) paid .20 to .30 cents an hour, it took an hour or more to buy a gallon of gas….T’day, with the minimum wage around $7.00 an hour, that same hours work’ll buy you two gallons of gas….and that, according to the liberal hearts, is how minimum wage is supposed to work…. Only problem is, first ’n foremost, y’got to find yourself a job! I ain’t talking welfare benefits here but I don’t doubt that some airhead Democrat politician would love to buy gas for the disenfranchised if he can only find a way to hide it in the budget… ‘Cause what happens to a small business, a fast food or similar business, is when you raise the wages of the employees, you automatically raise the price of doing business ’n in order to keep their profit margin (if it ain’t satisfactory, you close up ’n go on welfare same as your employees) WHY, they’re forced to raise their prices which pretty effectively cancels out the raise in pay they were forced to give their employees… And that’s how the welfare government works…the one percenters work ’n make money, lots of money, so we’ll just take it from them ’n the rest of us won’t have to do anything except sit home ’n watch our big screen teevee’s…oh, ’n drink our oversized sodas that go so well with the starchy fast foods that we live on because it’s too demanding to learn how to cook for ourselves…. I could go on ’n on, I suppose, but it’s getting a little wordy ’n I’m just repeating m’self ad infinitum ad nauseum to an audience that won’t read it anyway ’n if they did manage to get through some of it, it would only raise their blood pressure ’n they’d call me an angry old white man who is just pissed off because they rule the country now….